Tuesday, November 9th is the day Oceano's new album, "Contagion" comes out. Since I made quite a bit of artwork for this album, naturally I want everyone to go check it out! Here is the final piece that will be featured in the packaging. As you may well be aware by this point, "Contagion" is a concept album and each painting I made for Oceano was a small glimpse of the tale that is told in the lyrics of the songs. In this piece, the government-led force that created the virus in the first place is gunning down the result of their experiments.

As far as other projects go, things are ever busy on my side. I have done a lot of merchandise for Six Feet Under that should be making it's way online soon and I'm currently working on an album cover for the band, Labyrinthe. And to round out 2010, Behold the Monolith have asked me back for a second time and I'm very excited to get to work on that. There's more stuff I have on the horizon next year so keep checking back.

Here's another piece of artwork that I did for the interior packaging of Oceano's upcoming album, Contagion. I talked about it a little bit in in the press release that went out and it occurred to me that I haven't even posted it online yet. If you go to see them in concert during their support for Contagion, be sure to check out their stage scrims, as this image was blown up and used for their stage show. I haven't seen it myself, yet, so if you have pics send them my way!

Also, remember that Contagion comes out in about a month, so make sure to pre-order a copy HERE. Finally, they are currently on tour as part of Corruptour with Whitechapel, Impending Doom, Miss May I, and I Declare War.

The terrifying artwork depicted on the cover of OCEANO's November 9 release, "Contagion" was created by Dusty Peterson. Known for his work with BLOODBATH, SIX FEET UNDER and CATTLE DECAPITATION, he was sought out by the members of OCEANO as they are fans of his work. In the end, the band felt they couldn't have had made a better choice in an artist. "Adam [Warren, vocals] was particularly excited about the interior artwork to the album when I showed him," says Dusty. "He said something about some lyrics that he had written that matched up with it perfectly. The concept of theirs is very vivid, just like the artwork!"

So how exactly did Dusty go about taking things from concept to the final product presented on the album? As the artist himself puts it: "At the start, OCEANO had a very specific, lengthy concept that was based off of all of their lyrics. After considering the message that they wanted to convey, I basically dug deep into my horror movie interests and tried to make something that told the story of a government-caused viral outbreak but with a classic, old-school feel. I really wanted it to be colorful and eye-popping, but also very unsettling. I referenced everything from 28 days later to 'Dawn' and 'Day of the Dead' to classic DEATH album covers."

I just did an interview with a new metal blog, "Dose of Metal", which can be seen here. Do yourself a favor and add these guys to your bookmarks. They write some great stuff that isn't just copy-pasted from some other news feeds like a lot of the metal sites out there, so support them if you find them interesting!

As the first part of my "gory summer" that I get to finally show, here's the goriest of them all! This design for Cattle Decapitation, known for their extreme brand of grindcore, is based off of the song "A Body Farm".

From the press release, "..here we see a psychotic scientist who runs an environmental laboratory or "body farm" to study the effects of exposure, time and decomposition on human cadavers right in his back yard! All for the sake of crime scene investigation, right? WRONG: He's the one providing the cadavers...".

Check out the high resolution version here, and please do yourself a favor see these guys on tour to grab one of the many new awesome designs.